Preacher Says World To End 6PM May 21

Get those clothes out of the dry cleaners (or just leave them there, since you won’t need them). Don’t buy any green bananas. Harold Camping, an Oakland, CA preacher, says the Second Coming will occur on May 21 at 6PM. Two percent of the world will ascend to heaven, and the rest of us are in deep trouble. Camping isn’t just any nut; he has a large following.

If Mr Camping were speaking from any normal pulpit, it would be easy to dismiss him as just another religious eccentric wrongly calling the apocalypse. But thanks to this elderly man’s ubiquity, on America’s airwaves and billboards, his unlikely Doomsday message is almost impossible to ignore.

Every day Mr Camping, an 89-year-old former civil engineer, speaks to his followers via the Family Radio Network, a religious broadcasting organisation funded entirely by donations from listeners. Such is their generosity (assets total $120m) that his network now owns 66 stations in the US alone.

There are 2000 billboards across the country proclaiming, “Blow the trumpet, warn the people!”

“It’s getting real close. It’s really getting pretty awesome, when you think about it,” Mr Camping told The Independent on Sunday. “We’re not talking about a ball game, or a marriage, or graduating from college. We’re talking about the end of the world, a matter of being eternally dead, or being eternally alive, and it’s all coming to a head right now.”

Camping previously predicted our earthly demise for September 6, 1994. But that was before he really understood the Bible. “At that time there was a lot of the Bible I had not really researched very carefully.”